The newest version of KDE Four Live, an openSUSE-based Live CD for testing KDE 4, was released three days ago, just nine days after the initial version that included Release Candidate 1 was released. KDE/openSUSE dev Stephan Binner announced the release on his blog, celebrating the strong public interest in the initial RC1-based Live CD - over 10000 downloads achieved in the first few days. Meanwhile, although mainstream reviews of RC1 are still scarce, Binner's blog announcement of the previous version contained this interesting tidbit: "It looks like whatever [version of KDE 4] will be released or presented at the event which was fixed by the sponsor to happen in January will be only used by very early adopters. Hopefully openSUSE 11.0 will be able to ship some KDE 4.1.x release or some very high KDE 4.0.x release (which saw some light features freeze lift),"he wrote. Readers are welcome to download the newest Live CD (Torrent) and test it for themselves. A Debian LiveCD is also available, but it still includes KDE4 Beta4 and not RC1.

The people behind KDE failed to create a new generation DE. They had the opportunity to do it with KDE4 but they kept taking the wrong decisions.

It was clear from the start: to gather more users, they had to innovate. They had to create something different. They had to do what Apple did with OSX. Unfortunately, they failed to do it. They spent too much time working on the underlying technologies. Now, all we have is the same old KDE built on some new but incomplete libraries plus a new theme.

I don't know why it ended up like this. Alot of people contributed great ideas during the development of KDE4. Someone somewhere refused to listen to people.